Fucking A

A Tale of Two Hesters

Suzan-Lori Parks’s Fucking A draws its inspiration from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, a pillar of American literature. Yet when she first envisioned her play, Parks hadn’t even read the novel. The idea for the script, as she explained to a reporter from The Village Voice in 1999, initially came to her while she was rowing a canoe with a friend. Parks recalls, “I said, ‘I'm going to write a play called Fucking A....’ Ha ha ha, we laughed. We got back to shore, and I thought, ‘Not a bad idea.’” Parks notes that she did eventually read The Scarlet Letter in full, but only once, so that she could “riff on it.”

And riff she did. Rather than simply retelling Hawthorne’s 1850 masterpiece, Parks radically transports it to a post-apocalyptic world that makes the original story’s themes of shame, judgment, and resilience profoundly resonant for our contemporary zeitgeist. At the center of both stories is a woman named Hester, cast out and marked by a single punitive letter. But while Hawthorne’s Hester Prynne is condemned for bearing an illegitimate child, Parks’s Hester Smith is shunned by society for providing abortions (though the people who dismiss her during the day become her customers at night).

In truth, the world of Fucking A is not all that different from the seventeenth-century setting of The Scarlet Letter, as in both women’s bodies function as commodities—objects of desire, punishment, transaction, and objectification. Their value is based solely on their usefulness within society, prioritizing productivity over humanity and empathy. The physical labeling of both Hesters (“A” is for “Adultery” in Hawthorne’s novel, for “Abortionist” in Parks’s play) serves as a constant reminder that their identities are not their own, but are instead dictated by the moral and economic forces that govern their worlds. In each story, Hester’s branded body becomes a symbol of endurance, but also of systemic control, a means by which patriarchal structures maintain power over women’s positionality.

Both Hesters find strength in motherhood, though there is a cruel burden that comes with it. In The Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne raises her daughter, Pearl, under the watchful eye of a puritanical society that sees mother and child as symbols of sin. In Fucking A, Hester Smith is robbed of the chance to raise her son by a system designed to prey on the poor and powerless. Prynne clings to her role as a mother, but Smith’s motherhood is defined by absence, and her journey is one of desperation and heartache as she fights to reclaim both her son and her identity as a “true mother.” Hester Smith’s story echoes the struggles of mothers throughout history: those who have lost children, those who have had children taken away, and those who would do anything—even the unimaginable—to protect their children.

Fucking A rejects a romanticized portrayal of what it means to be a mother, choosing instead to show the audience that for so many, being a mother can be brutal and aching, shaped by fear, longing, and an ever-present awareness of systemic violence. In reimagining Hawthorne’s tale through the multifaceted lens of gender, class, and justice, Parks forces us to confront the deep-rooted ways in which women’s bodies remain sites of control and conflict. 

—Dr. Megan Stahl